Friday, January 1, 2016

2015 saw a decrease in new projects as I continue to "try" to focus my wargaming into just By Fire and Sword and Dropzone Commander, but as usual, there are plenty of distraction side projects.

Dropzone Commander continues to be a main focus, although I can't say I painted a lot of it in 2015 - mainly because I already owned most everything for every faction prior to this year! I acquired and painted off 2015's new releases as they came out, but releases have been slow due to the work on Dropfleet. Most of the year's releases centered around Resistance, which is also the army I took to (and won) Las Vegas Open and GenCon with. (And lost spectacularly on my home field at NOVA Open!)

Towards the end of the year, I did work on a lot of terrain - including two tables of 4Ground stuff and three more Monorail kits.

By Fire and Sword has been my driving historical game of 2015. I massively increased my Ottomans to a truly unnecessary size, and also started a quite sizable Cossack army.

I have pretty much lost all interest in WW2 Flames of War. I have continued to play WW1 FoW with our local crew, but haven't started any new projects with it. I did buy a decent force for the FoW Vietnam Brown Water Navy expansion this summer, and ran a few large Vietnam games. Sadly, Battlefront's 2016 preview has nothing for Vietnam at all, and I have a feeling that line is now dead.

The end of the year saw the release of Team Yankee. I already had a decent microarmor Cold War Polish collection, but it didn't translate to the units used in Team Yankee at all. So I expanded them further to encompass the Team Yankee options, and also picked up an American army to fight them.

Games Workshop killed off my beloved Warhammer Fantasy quite spectacularly, but before that, they did run an "End Times" series, with some gorgeous new Skaven models that I of course picked up. Never used them for Warhammer Fantasy though....

But I did start up Kings of War in WFB's absence. I haven't played a ton of it with my Skaven, but I have made use of last year's Pike and Shot army, and started a new army - Wood Elves, which I "multibased" for KoW specifically.

Frostgrave came and went. That was a flash in the pan. But it didn't die before I had a chance to complete a Puppet army for it! All Malifaux figures, so I guess if I ever wanted to play Malifaux again, I could use them for that.

On the completely random projects front, I painted up some more Light Infantry for my Napoleon at War French army (still have yet to play it beyond demos) and a random DBA army, which I promptly sold.

2015 has seen a rise in my interest of board games, especially those from Plaid Hat Games. I painted up Mice and Mystics and Tail Feathers

Also did some reinforcements from 2014's board game flop, Myth. Hoping the new Myth 2.0 rules will reignite some interest in the game, and I hope Tail Feathers continues to grow in 2016.

I jumped head first into Star Wars Armada, and painted up those fighters, and then sold that off too....just not a convenient local group to play it with.

As far as events go, travel was about the same as 2014. I traveled to Las Vegas Open, Historicon, GenCon, NOVA Open, and Fall-In. I played in DZC tournaments at Las Vegas Open (1st), GenCon (1st), and NOVA Open (somewhere close to last). I ran a multiplayer DZC/Roleplaying game at Historicon, as well as a massive 12 player By Fire and Sword game based on the Siege of Vienna.

At our local shop, I ran one 12 player DZC league (that's technically still going on), ran four FoW tournaments, and hosted numerous participation games. We also had one 12 player BFAS tournament hosted by my mate Frank (I came in somewhere near the bottom of that one too - I seem to do worse in events the closer to home they are!)

A large chunk of the year was cut out due to purchasing a house, and the packing/unpacking of all this crap you see here. But now, I have a full fledged nerdgaming room, complete with a modular 4x8 table, shelves of terrain for all eras and styles, and glass cabinets displaying almost all of my figures.

Looking forward to 2016, I intend to continue my focus with DZC and BFAS, although I will probably travel less for it this year. I also anticipate a lot more board gaming - I'm currently enamored with Tail Feathers, Mice and Mystics, Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, and Heroes of Normandie, and hoping to re-add Myth to that rotation. I've also had good luck hosting some non-gamer game nights of board games with games such as Settlers of Catan, Dead of Winter, and the new hit, Codenames.